by David Lough
Fleet Street proprietors knew the value of trenchant copy from a well-known name. Lord Riddell, for one, was happy to meet Churchill’s self-imposed tariff. Not content with just ‘Great Stories Retold’ in the News of the World, Riddell commissioned an illustrated version of The World Crisis to be sold in weekly episodes alongside his Sunday newspaper. An unexpected success, it averaged sales of 35,000 copies a week and earned Churchill royalties of more than £4,000.58
A successful literary year was crowned when the first volume of Marlborough: His Life and Times finally reached British bookshops on 6 October, the day on which Hitler withdrew from the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Greeted by critical and public acclaim, the book’s sales reached 8,500 in Britain within a week.59
‘I sometimes look at that row of volumes in my little library, and I cannot think how you have found the spare time to have got through the physical labour alone of writing them,’ Stanley Baldwin wrote to Churchill. ‘This last book would mean years of work even for a man whose sole occupation was writing history. Well, there is the miracle and let it remain. But I don’t understand it.’60
Churchill celebrated Marlborough’s success by borrowing $25,000 from Vickers da Costa to buy a New York share strongly recommended by Bernard Baruch. ‘I bought seven hundred Brooklyn Manhattan Transit around [$]30, sold four hundred around [$]35 and am now sitting on three hundred. Many thanks for the fruitful suggestion,’ Churchill cabled in mid-October.61 Brooklyn Manhattan Transit – or ‘BMTs’ as they soon became known around Chartwell – featured strongly for several years, as Baruch (who still owned $500,000-worth himself) was sure that consolidation of New York’s railway system was bound to come and had a well-informed source within the boardroom, some of whose intelligence found its way to London.62
For the time being, Churchill’s Marlborough money and his last Sherwood Starrs shares (sold with the help of Sir Abe Bailey’s price guarantee)63 brought his overdraft down to respectable levels during the autumn. However, it rose again when the special commissioners of the Inland Revenue demanded that a long overdue sur-tax bill of £3,000 was paid before the end of December.64 Churchill’s borrowings from his bank, brokers, insurers and family trusts finished 1933 at a total of £45,000.65
It was not his income that was the problem, because the £15,500 earnings from his writing that year put him among Britain’s best-paid men. But Churchill had lost nearly half this amount at the casino or on the stock market.66
*1 The party’s fares cost $755. As a result of losses incurred on Churchill’s tour, Alber’s business was forced to merge with a competitor in 1932.
*2 Nancy Pearn (1950), literary agent; joined Curtis Brown 1922; left with two colleagues to found Pearn, Pollinger & Higham 1935.
*3 Walter Newman Flower (1879–1964), magazine publisher, Cassell & Co 1906; bought Cassell’s book business from Amalagamated Press 1927; author George Frideric Handel 1923, Franz Schubert 1928; knighted 1938.
*4 Frederick Lindemann (1886–1957), known as ‘the prof’; professor of experimental philosophy (physics) Oxford University 1919–56; fellow of the Royal Society 1920; member, government sub-committee on air defence research 1935–6; personal assistant to Churchill, head of statistical section, Admiralty 1939–40; chief government scientific adviser 1939-45; paymaster-general 1942–5; paymaster-general 1951–3; Baron Cherwell 1941, Viscount Cherwell 1956; a teetotaler, non-smoker and vegetarian, but a close friend of Churchill (and his scientific adviser) after meeting him in 1921.
*5 President Roosevelt’s executive order required American citizens to transfer their gold to the US Treasury within four weeks, in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce. Any future transactions would take place at $35 per ounce, a devaluation of the dollar by more than 40 per cent. The US government used the Treasury’s profits on these transactions to create an Exchange Stabilization Fund to use for intervention in currency markets.
16
‘The work piles up ahead’
Summoning More Ghosts, 1934–5
Exchange rates: $5 = £1; francs 76 = £1
Inflation multiples: US x 17; UK x 60
CHURCHILL WAS IN great demand as a writer in 1934. Collier’s, the News of the World and Daily Mail had all renewed their commitments for the new year. They were joined by the Sunday Dispatch, whose veteran editor, William Blackwood, Churchill had known in his days as a Manchester MP. Blackwood wanted ‘second serial’ rights to Churchill’s old material, which one of his jobbing journalists, Adam Marshall Diston,*1 would rework; Churchill would be expected to write only one fresh piece in four.1
Six articles under Churchill’s name appeared in the press during January, the first of a total of fifty during the year.2 Each one had to be typed, retyped and dispatched by Violet Pearman, Churchill’s senior secretary at Chartwell, or her assistant, Grace Hamblin, who told an audience many years later:
In the wilderness years [Churchill] worked like a tiger to keep up his literary output. It was his living, and he wasn’t terribly well off. He would start at about ten o’clock in the evening, after dinner, and the secretaries (during those years there were only two of us, Mrs Pearman and myself) worked alternately. The one who went home early went at seven, and the one who was on late duty had dinner there and waited until he was ready. He would keep on and on and on until he’d gone as far as he wanted to.
Newspaper articles, she observed, ‘were very exciting because they were done in one evening, quickly put out and sent off usually the next day. He got his money very quickly, which he liked too.’3
Following the first volume’s British success, Churchill suggested splitting Marlborough once again to produce a third volume, but this time with an extra reward for the author. He first put the case to George Harrap: ‘Our original contract was for two hundred thousand words. I shall now in any case write four hundred thousand at the same price, but if I am to make a third volume, the whole amounting to six hundred thousand words, a new arrangement would be necessary.’ He mentioned that he already had a valuable deal from Cassell to keep him going beyond 1935, but made it clear that the ‘lucrative’ commitment could be postponed if Harrap offered him £3,000 and fellow publishers followed suit.4 Harrap agreed by return, but Charles Scribner flatly declined on the grounds that he had never made any money from a single Churchill book. Even Lord Camrose at The Daily Telegraph baulked at the extra £1,250 that he was asked to produce, but at the next dinner of The Other Club,*2 to which Camrose had been elected, he agreed, as a friend, to pay £500.5
The prospects of Marlborough’s second volume being published before the end of 1934 were already looking doubtful. There was not only the vast number of articles to which Churchill had committed, but political tensions in Europe were claiming a growing proportion of his time as he campaigned to reverse the British government’s policy of disarmament.
In March 1934 a new distraction presented itself: the cinema. Ever since his visit to Hollywood in 1929 Churchill had kept an eye on this new industry as a possible channel for the extra earnings which he needed. Indeed, in 1933 Curtis Brown had almost clinched a deal for a film about Churchill’s life, before Paramount Pictures pulled out, citing ‘the banking situation, earthquakes in Hollywood, etc.’6 By the time Randolph introduced his father to the film producer Alexander Korda*3 in 1934, the movie industry’s prospects had been transformed by the invention of Technicolor.
Korda, a forty-year-old Hungarian immigrant, was the managing director of his own London Film Productions. He well understood the publicity value of involving Churchill in a series of ten short, topical films that he was planning. Korda asked Churchill to name his price for helping to write and produce these movies. Churchill knew equally why he was wanted: ‘It must be borne in mind that the main thing I am giving the company is the right to use my name and that, once this has been announced, a very valuable asset has been contributed by me,’ Churchill told his lawyer. They decided he should ask for a salary of £400 a month for ten months, plus 25 per cent of t
he films’ profits.7
Korda sent Churchill his first pay cheque at the end of March,8 but there was to be no public announcement or substantive work until the autumn. This was just as well, because Churchill’s political commitments now took up much of his time.*4 His campaign against disarmament meant frequent speeches to the House of Commons, which required careful preparation. He also spent several days preparing a submission to the House of Commons Privileges Committee with the help of lawyers: Churchill had raised a complaint about possible tampering by the government with evidence put before the Joint Select Committee involved in the Government of India Bill.9
Still plugging away at the second volume of Marlborough when he could, Churchill dispatched eight chapters to Eddie Marsh for proofreading in May.10 Meanwhile, he tried to keep Newman Flower satisfied that his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples was progressing. ‘You will be glad to hear that I am making a great deal of progress in the preparatory work of this book,’ he told Flower. Two days later, on the other hand, Churchill apologized to Oxford historian Keith Feiling, whom he had diverted from Marlborough to help prepare an outline for his History, that there had not been time to look over any of his work. ‘I have been much burdened by politics,’ he explained. These had now ‘thrown Marlborough Volume III over to the spring of 1936’.11
Because he regarded Collier’s and the Daily Mail as the mainstays of his income, Churchill had always written these articles himself. However, by the middle of 1934 the demands on his time made this impossible. In May Churchill was forced to ask William Blackwood to draft an outline of his next article for the Sunday Dispatch, but Blackwood went one better: he provided a finished text that needed no changes. It had been put together by Blackwood’s jobbing journalist, Adam Marshall Diston. ‘He is a splendid journalist, is Diston,’ Blackwood enthused, ‘and if you ever descend to having a “ghost” I could strongly recommend him.’12 Churchill ‘descended’ a fortnight later, offering Diston £15 for each remaining article of his Collier’s series, a fraction of his own fee of £350.13 It was the start of a partnership that would flourish for the rest of the decade.
Every word, however, of Churchill’s tribute in The Times of 2 July to his ‘oldest and dearest friend’, the 9th duke of Marlborough, was his own and intensely felt. His cousin’s sudden death had evoked in Churchill sombre reflections on the changes in wealth and society that they had jointly witnessed bearing down on their family:
During the forty-two years that he was Duke of Marlborough, the organism of English society underwent a complete revolution. The three or four hundred families which for three or four hundred years guided the fortunes of the nation from a small, struggling community to the headship of a vast and still unconquered Empire lost their authority and control... The class to which the Duke belonged were not only almost entirely relieved of their political responsibilities, but they were to a very large extent stripped of their property and in many cases driven from their homes.14
Churchill’s growing commitments had not distracted him completely from the financial markets. The year had started inauspiciously when sterling weakened just before large forward dollar purchases matured, losing him £300.15 His turnover of American shares was limited to $140,000 in the first half of 1934, much of it concentrated on ‘BMTs’, as he kept checking with Baruch whether the long-awaited consolidation of New York’s railway system was imminent. ‘BMT oboy,’ he cabled late in April, when the share price spiked just after he had sold most of his stake. ‘Have still got some. Please advise.’16
By June Churchill had banked profits of $2,600, but his overdraft breached its £9,000 limit. As the long holiday season approached, Churchill realized that another encounter with the bank was inevitable. He forecast that his earnings would exceed expenditure by £5,000 for the rest of the year and so convinced Stanley Williams to let the breach of the bank’s limit stand until the next Marlborough advances arrived.17 As a result Grace Hamblin was able to use £650 to pay off selected tradesmen before Churchill set off for Cannes with Randolph.
Father and son found Maxine Elliott, their hostess, ‘greatly impoverished by the American slump, & the $ exchange’. Her usual income of $150,000 a year had been reduced by a third,18 but Clementine found it difficult from afar to sympathize with a single woman on £10,000 a year.
Even on holiday work continued to arrive. George Riddell cabled to say that he wanted a new series on Churchill’s early life for the News of the World: ‘Say – 30,000 words, price £2,500.’ A follow-up letter sweetened the terms, although Riddell was adamant: ‘Copy to be written by you personally, not too much politics.’ Churchill immediately set his new ghost to work.19 Diston would dig out old articles and books – in this case a copy of My Early Life that Churchill sent him – and then shuffle them and paste them together with linking passages, before returning them to Churchill to add an extra sentence or two. Confident that between them they would be able to stretch the word count, Churchill inked in an extra £3,500 to his forecast of income for the year. ‘I hope to pay off a good many bills at the end of this year,’ he told Clementine, ‘& next year we really ought to be able to save a substantial sum.’20
This hope came to an end when Churchill and Randolph visited Cannes’s Palm Beach Casino to celebrate the dispatch of the final proofs of the second volume of Marlborough: His Life and Times. The newspaper gossip columns kept Clementine up to date:
The Sunday papers are full of the Churchills & their works. Your instalments of Marlborough, Randolph’s ‘Searchlight’, news that you & he are playing roulette (you did not tell your poor Pussy Cat!) you intensely, he in an ‘effervescent manner’.21
Her letter prompted a confession from Churchill: ‘I have indeed been playing at the Casino, though at Chemin de Fer, and have lost uniformly, but not on a large scale. Randolph too has lost and has stopped playing.’22 Churchill had withdrawn 60,000 francs of cash for himself, but deposited only 1,250 on his return.23
Randolph’s losses only emerged later, when the casino pressed him to honour cheques worth £1,900. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Randolph admitted to running up other debts of £4,350, all since his grandfather’s trust’s money had wiped the slate clean a year earlier. Churchill avoided strict censure, all too aware of his own brushes with ‘Mephistopheles’. Instead he instructed Nicholl, Manisty & Co. to honour the cheques with money raised from his father’s trust. Randolph was to repay £800 a year until he had reimbursed the full £6,100 now advanced to him.24
Churchill had promised Clementine that he would join her on an October cruise around the eastern Mediterranean, on board the Rosaura,*5 the private yacht of Walter Guinness. While on board he planned to work on Korda’s film scripts. Just before he left, however, Korda came up with a new and even more lucrative assignment: he wanted Churchill to produce a screenplay for a film to mark George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. ‘I am going to begin this scenario immediately and side track all my other work’, Churchill promised Korda, accepting the offer of a £10,000 guarantee and 25 per cent of the film’s net profits.25
Churchill wrote his screenplay aboard the Rosaura, sailing between Athens, Beirut, Alexandria and Naples and handed it over to Korda on his return. While he was away George Harrap published the second volume of Marlborough in London,26 but the disappearance of the maps at New York customs forced the postponement of the American edition – and (more significantly for Churchill) of Scribner’s cheque on publication.
Churchill had promised his bank manager that his overdraft would reduce in size after the publication of the second volume of Marlborough. Instead, it finished October at a record level of £12,000.27 Salvation came only when the News of the World agreed to send its cheque for Churchill’s life story early: the bank was satisfied, although the cheque was post-dated to 1 January 1935. The newspaper’s general manager Major Percy Davies declared the story (ghostwritten by Marshall Diston) to be ‘brilliant and highly entertaining’, and happily agreed to Churchi
ll’s suggestion that his fee for 44,000 words should be settled at £4,200.28
While struggling to contain his overdraft, Churchill kept up his campaign against the National Socialists’ treatment of Germany’s civilian population. He warned that the British would soon have to choose whether or not to defend their way of life. Churchill’s first political victory came on disarmament, when the cabinet announced the building of extra aircraft, a key concern of Churchill’s newspaper columns and House of Commons speeches.
Churchill’s preparation for a speech in the House involved days of marshalling information from a network of informants, including his intelligence-linked neighbour, Desmond Morton, and a senior Foreign Office diplomat, Roger Winant. The build-up to parliamentary speeches became a familiar feature of Chartwell life, but it meant that his books, films and personal business had to be temporarily set aside.
The Garron Tower estate was certainly in need of Churchill’s attention. In theory it still generated £900 a year of rental income, but large rent arrears were accumulating on the Carnlough slums that passed for workers’ cottages.29 Churchill set his mind against suing his tenants or turning them out of their homes. Instead, he instructed his lawyers to hand the cottages over to their tenants for one guinea each: ‘The gift is conditional on this being done by all. Let action be taken at once and the tenants be told by Christmas.’30
Disappointingly, the Silver Jubilee film project was making slow progress. Korda had plenty of competitors and the king and the government were trying to cajole them into forming a single, semi-official consortium. Korda broke the news in mid-December that his ‘financial friends’ wanted Churchill’s guarantee halved to £5,000.
Churchill complained that just two months earlier Korda had declared his screenplay ‘a really splendid basis for preliminary work’; however, he had no alternative but to give way: Korda was his only good contact in an industry that he still regarded as central to his future finances. Churchill’s only condition was that Korda’s London Films should extend his monthly retainer on the original series, yet to be made. ‘Toiling at film,’ he cabled over Christmas, after Clementine left on a long cruise to the Dutch East Indies on a mission to bring back a Komodo dragon for London Zoo.31
